Stumbled into the Sydney real estate market, where rent prices are more than double what we are used to, and only the wealthiest people can afford to buy property

Managed to find a great little apartment for rent within our budget

Bought out most of IKEA

Moved into said apartment (we’re getting good at this moving thing)

Helped to finish up 3 papers from the project Katrin, Tim, and I did last year, and 1 paper from the project Steve and I did 3 years ago

Read at least a dozen papers on interactions between Antarctic ice shelves and the Southern Ocean – my PhD project will be somewhere in this field

Gone out for climate beers (regular beers consumed by climate scientists) and discussed whether the Canadian or the Australian political system is more fundamentally broken

Swam in the ocean three times, and discovered that if you put on goggles and look underneath the water you can see FISH swimming around beneath you

Things are finally calming down now, and I should have time to write more frequently. Now that my head is not so full of flight schedules and rental agreements and shopping lists, it has a lot more space for climate science, and for topics to write about here.

I am so, so happy to be back at the CCRC. It is such a friendly, supportive, and enriching place to do research. While I miss my family and the Canadian wildlife and Canadian autumn (definitely not Canadian winter), this is the best time in my life to travel and explore the planet which I spend so much time studying, and hopefully, helping.

After a long hiatus – much longer than I like to think about or admit to – I am finally back. I just finished the last semester of my undergraduate degree, which was by far the busiest few months I’ve ever experienced.

This was largely due to my honours thesis, on which I spent probably three times more effort than was warranted. I built a (not very good, but still interesting) model of ocean circulation and implemented it in Python. It turns out that (surprise, surprise) it’s really hard to get a numerical solution to the Navier-Stokes equations to converge. I now have an enormous amount of respect for ocean models like MOM, POP, and NEMO, which are extremely realistic as well as extremely stable. I also feel like I know the physics governing ocean circulation inside out, which will definitely be useful going forward.

Convocation is not until early June, so I am spending the month of May back in Toronto working with Steve Easterbrook. We are finally finishing up our project on the software architecture of climate models, and writing it up into a paper which we hope to submit early this summer. It’s great to be back in Toronto, and to have a chance to revisit all of the interesting places I found the first time around.

In August I will be returning to Australia to begin a PhD in Climate Science at the University of New South Wales, with Katrin Meissner and Matthew England as my supervisors. I am so, so excited about this. It was a big decision to make but ultimately I’m confident it was the right one, and I can’t wait to see what adventures Australia will bring.

The article in question highlights the scientific inaccuracies of the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow, in which global warming leads to a new ice age. Now that I’ve taken more courses in thermodynamics I could definitely expand on the original post if I had the time and inclination to watch the film again…

I did a bit more digging in my stats and discovered that most viewers are reaching this article through Google searches such as “is the day after tomorrow true”, “is the day after tomorrow likely to happen”, and “movie review of a day after tomorrow if it is possible or impossible.” The answers are no, no, and impossible, respectively.

But why the sudden surge in interest? I think it is probably related to the record cold temperatures across much of the United States, an event which media outlets have dubbed the “polar vortex”. I prefer “Arctic barf”.

Part of the extremely cold air mass which covers the Arctic has essentially detached and spilled southward over North America. In other words, the Arctic has barfed on the USA. Less sexy terminology than “polar vortex”, perhaps, but I would argue it is more enlightening.

The Polar Vortex, a huge system of swirling air that normally contains the polar cold air has shifted so it is not sitting right on the pole as it usually does. We are not seeing an expansion of cold, an ice age, or an anti-global warming phenomenon. We are seeing the usual cold polar air taking an excursion.

Note that other regions such as Alaska and much of Europe are currently experiencing unusually warm winter weather. On balance, the planet isn’t any colder than normal. The cold patches are just moving around in an unusual way.

Having grown up in the Canadian Prairies, where we experience daily lows below -30°C for at least a few days each year (and for nearly a month straight so far this winter), I can’t say I have a lot of sympathy. Or maybe I’m just bitter because I never got a day off school due to the cold? But seriously, nothing has to shut down if you plug in the cars at night and bundle up like an astronaut. We’ve been doing it for years.

At public hearings on the environmental impacts of proposed oil pipelines, Canadians are no longer allowed to discuss climate change: any testimonials concerning how the oil was produced (“upstream effects”) and what will happen when it is burned (“downstream effects”) are considered inadmissible. This new policy was part of a 2012 omnibus bill by the federal government.

So if we refuse to consider the risks, they don’t exist? Or does this government just not care? I’m not sure I want to know the answer.

On Monday evening, a Canadian research helicopter in northwest Nunavut crashed into the Arctic Ocean. Three men from the CGCS Amundsen research vessel were on board, examining the sea ice from above to determine the best route for the ship to take. All three were killed in the crash: climate scientist Klaus Hochheim, commanding officer Marc Thibault, and pilot Daniel Dubé.

The Amundsen recovered the bodies, which will be entrusted to the RCMP as soon as the ship reaches land. The helicopter remains at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean (~400 m deep); until it can be retrieved, the cause of the crash will remain unknown.

Klaus Hochheim

During my first two years of university, I worked on and off in the same lab as Klaus. He was often in the field, and I was often rushing off to class, so we only spoke a few times. He was very friendly and energetic, and I regret not getting to know him better. My thoughts are with the families, friends, and close colleagues of these three men, who have far more to mourn than I do.

Perhaps some solace can be found in the thought that they died doing what they loved best. All of the Arctic scientists I know are incredibly passionate about their field work: bring them down south for too long, and they start itching to get back on the ship. In the modern day, field scientists are perhaps the closest thing we have to explorers. Such a demanding job comes with immense personal and societal rewards, but also with risks.

These events remind me of another team of explorers that died while pursuing their calling, at the opposite pole and over a hundred years ago: the Antarctic expedition of 1912 led by Robert Falcon Scott. While I was travelling in New Zealand, I visited the Scott Memorial in the Queenstown public gardens. Carved into a stone tablet and set into the side of a boulder is an excerpt from Scott’s last diary entry. I thought the words were relevant to Monday night’s tragedy, so I have reproduced them below.

We arrived within eleven miles of our old One Ton camp with fuel for one hot meal and food for two days. For four days we have been unable to leave the tent, the gale is howling about us. We are weak, writing is difficult, but, for my own sake, I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past.

We took risks; we knew we took them. Things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of providence, determined still to do our best to the last.

Had we lived I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.

About

Kaitlin Naughten is a PhD student in climate science at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. She became interested in climate science as a teenager on the Canadian Prairies, and increasingly began to notice the discrepancies between scientific and public knowledge on climate change. She started writing this blog at age sixteen to help address this gap in public understanding, and it slowly evolved into a record of her research as a young climate scientist. Read more

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